This is Jacob Atkins, a 20-year-old biology major at the University of Iowa. Like most people, Atkins agrees that 2017 has been quite a year, especially with a lot of negative stories circulating in the news.

Jacob Atkins

After being inspired by a tweet he saw last year, Atkins decided he would do something to help combat bad news fatigue. So on Dec. 20, he started a Twitter thread of some lesser-known positive stories from the year.

The thread has since gone massively viral with hundreds of thousands of retweets and likes. Atkins said the responses have been overwhelmingly positive, with a few trolls here and there. He went onto sat that the intent of the thread was simple: "I hope people take away that there is always some good even if it’s hard to see."